I was at first going to just tack on to Hydroguy's excellent thread http://www.disboards.com/threads/ob...on-fp-mb-mde-from-our-trip-this-week.3410624/, but then I realized I would have enough comments that it would be a very long tack-on.
I'll follow his pattern and start with background / qualifiers:
We were also in the parks this last week; like Hydroguy we experienced 4-5 level crowds and our observations might not apply to busier times. Although our usual pattern is to come in August, the crowds were similar to what we usually experience at that time (and the temperature too!) so I feel comfortable making comparisons to our previous trips.
We are a family of 5, kids age 7, 11, 14. Our past pattern has been to come to WDW once every two years at the end of August for two weeks at a time (last trip in 2013). We have never been commandos, we are in the arrive at rope drop and leave by 1, possibly returning in the evening but mostly not set. We have mostly stayed off-site in the past, and were off-site this trip as well. This was our first FP+ trip; we were users of the FP- system but due to our relatively short park stints I wouldn't say that we were super-users -- most days we might use anywhere from 2-3 before the return times started to get out of the range where we would be in the park.
I have always felt about FP+ compared to FP- that it's a bit like the quote commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time". There are indisputably people for whom FP+ legitimately works less well than FP-, and I do not deny or denigrate their experiences. This post is about my experiences.
On to the observations:
--Since we were off-site, we only had a 30-day window. I was still able to get everything we wanted including 7DMT (although we didn't actually get to ride it in the end). I did not book at midnight when the window opened, I usually booked sometime in the morning after.
--I would say one of the most pertinent observations was similar to what Hydroguy found, this felt mostly like a regular Disney trip to us. The changes imposed by FP+ were in the noise compared to the changes imposed by the ages of our kids, the circumstances of our trip, etc.
--I'm going to follow that up by saying that due to schedule constraints imposed by the circumstances of this trip, I believe that FP+ was largely responsible for the fact that it felt very similar, given that we were unable to utilize RD as we had in the past. We often arrived at the parks at 11 AM or later, and still only stayed 4-5 hours because some of my family really wilt in the heat. Our ability to ride the same rides as usual with FP combined with about the same amount of non-FP stuff was, IMO, the result of having FP booked in advance.
--We used a combination of bands and cards, and found them to work equally well (2-5 seconds as Hydroguy experienced) at FP+ touchpoints.
--We used a combination of bands and cards, and found them to be equally glitchy at the gates -- my husband had one glitchy time with a card, my son had one glitchy one with with a band that was resolved by moving to a different scanner. Most importantly, we found this level of glitchiness to be entirely consistent with what we have experienced at the gates in the past. No better, no worse.
--Similar to Hydroguy, we did not observe an increase in waits for rides that had not had FP in the past or were in the short-wait / walk-on category.
--Similar to Hydroguy, we used MDE without any freezing or crashing, we were on an iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5C using park WiFi. We did notice that it was sometimes slow to pull up our itinerary depending on what location we were in, but not tragically so -- and I don't know whether or not it was that we closed MDE when we weren't actively looking, but we didn't have battery issues on our phones.
--We had mixed success rescheduling during the day, some were easy, there were a couple of times we wanted to move things around and couldn't. We did coin a new term, the "Fast Passident", which is what happens when your teenager using MDE on the phone for the first time accidentally converts your 7DMT FP to Ariel's Grotto. DH was under the weather and not with us that day, so we decided it was a sign that we shouldn't ride it the first time without him.
--We definitely, definitely did not miss splitting up so that someone could go to get FP and then reconvene somewhere else. I know not everyone did this, but by all reports we were not the only ones who did.
Some less tangible -- and maybe even more useful -- observations ...
I felt like it did take some our family members longer to "break in" to FP+; it seemed to me that there were some psychological "flip of perspective" aspects to it similar to price tags that say $4.99 instead of $5. In the end I would class almost of all those as being some form of valuing FP+ more highly than we valued FP-. More specifically:
--DH on the third day said that he really liked it, but he thought it made the day feel scripted. After some discussion, he realized this was because he was regarding the beginning of the FP window as a fixed point that we had to make, rather than remembering that we had an entire hour to be there. We never did that with FP-, we always knew we had the whole hour and worked our plans around that. Once he realized he was doing this, we were able to go back to making plans that considered FP+ times the same as we would have weighted an old FP- time, and he said that he felt immediately less scripted and actually increasingly more comfortable with it on subsequent days.
A note here on the subject of spontaneity: one thing we realized this trip is that now that we have a severely opinionated 14 yo and an 11 yo, even the level of spontaneity that we had in the past doesn't always work for us. Not having a general plan turned out to be a recipe for standing around for 30 minutes arguing about what we should do while everyone got hot and cranky. So I do feel that this trip was less spontaneous for us, but I don't feel that FP+ was the biggest contributor to that loss. The days when we had the most disagreement about what to do, we didn't have problems changing our times when we finally came up with a plan that made everyone happy -- although again, low crowd time.
In some ways FP+ really helped us to have a plan that wasn't a plan; on the MK day described above, having the fixed points of FP limited our choices somewhat for the unplanned things that we did (Tikis, BTMRR, FOF parade) and made it easier for us to come to those spontaneous decisions. Our worst day was when we had all our FP first and then weren't ready to leave the park but had a blank canvas in front of us. Our second worst was when our middle FP ride was down, and were left with a big stretch and no constraints.
--Another mindset adjustment: one day we were planning the next little bit and someone said something like "and then we have to hang out until 3:25 to use our FP". I was like "What do you mean we have to hang out, this is one of our favorite parks where we never feel like we finish everything and there's tons of stuff to do in the meantime?" It turned out that we were parked out for the day, and with paper FP we would have just handed them to someone on our way out, but because of the "higher weighting" effect, people who didn't really want to stay in the park were suggesting that we stay in the park just to wait for the FP, not even because it was that important to them to ride that specific ride. Once we realized this we changed them to something low-demand so that someone else could pick up our desirable slots, and left.
Overall, I would say our experience was very positive, although it there was definitely a mindset adjustment and there were times when it didn't work out for us. Compared to FP-, I feel there were more times when FP+ worked in our favor where FP- wouldn't have helped us than there were the other way around. For us, I feel like the most concrete benefit of FP+ going forward is a result of the general wisdom that it is a very effective use of FP+ to schedule them for mid or late morning on. One of our big sticking points in the past was those mornings that we just couldn't get going. While we still intend to use RD as we have in the past, having mid/late-morning FP will allow us to wake up on some mornings, decide that we're too tired and sleep in an extra hour without having to sacrifice riding two or three hot ticket rides on FP. We'll still get less stuff done than if we arrived at RD, but the loss will be more in keeping with a price we're willing to pay for the extra relaxation of a slow start.
I'll follow his pattern and start with background / qualifiers:
We were also in the parks this last week; like Hydroguy we experienced 4-5 level crowds and our observations might not apply to busier times. Although our usual pattern is to come in August, the crowds were similar to what we usually experience at that time (and the temperature too!) so I feel comfortable making comparisons to our previous trips.
We are a family of 5, kids age 7, 11, 14. Our past pattern has been to come to WDW once every two years at the end of August for two weeks at a time (last trip in 2013). We have never been commandos, we are in the arrive at rope drop and leave by 1, possibly returning in the evening but mostly not set. We have mostly stayed off-site in the past, and were off-site this trip as well. This was our first FP+ trip; we were users of the FP- system but due to our relatively short park stints I wouldn't say that we were super-users -- most days we might use anywhere from 2-3 before the return times started to get out of the range where we would be in the park.
I have always felt about FP+ compared to FP- that it's a bit like the quote commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time". There are indisputably people for whom FP+ legitimately works less well than FP-, and I do not deny or denigrate their experiences. This post is about my experiences.
On to the observations:
--Since we were off-site, we only had a 30-day window. I was still able to get everything we wanted including 7DMT (although we didn't actually get to ride it in the end). I did not book at midnight when the window opened, I usually booked sometime in the morning after.
--I would say one of the most pertinent observations was similar to what Hydroguy found, this felt mostly like a regular Disney trip to us. The changes imposed by FP+ were in the noise compared to the changes imposed by the ages of our kids, the circumstances of our trip, etc.
--I'm going to follow that up by saying that due to schedule constraints imposed by the circumstances of this trip, I believe that FP+ was largely responsible for the fact that it felt very similar, given that we were unable to utilize RD as we had in the past. We often arrived at the parks at 11 AM or later, and still only stayed 4-5 hours because some of my family really wilt in the heat. Our ability to ride the same rides as usual with FP combined with about the same amount of non-FP stuff was, IMO, the result of having FP booked in advance.
A concrete example: On Monday, we arrived at MK around 11:30, took care of some errands at Guest Relations, got a snack, rode Jungle Cruise (55 minutes standby) using FP, went to the Tiki Room, went to our 1 PM lunch at Liberty Tree Tavern, rode Splash Mountain (60 minutes standby) using FP, rode BTMRR (wait time 25 minutes) standby, saw the FF parade, and then rode Peter Pan's Flight (25 minutes standby) using FP before leaving the park at a little after 3:30. I do not think we could have reasonably expected to replicate this kind of ride sequence / line experience using FP- and arriving when we did, although it would have been quite reasonable had we arrived at RD as we had in the past.
--We used a combination of bands and cards, and found them to work equally well (2-5 seconds as Hydroguy experienced) at FP+ touchpoints.
--We used a combination of bands and cards, and found them to be equally glitchy at the gates -- my husband had one glitchy time with a card, my son had one glitchy one with with a band that was resolved by moving to a different scanner. Most importantly, we found this level of glitchiness to be entirely consistent with what we have experienced at the gates in the past. No better, no worse.
--Similar to Hydroguy, we did not observe an increase in waits for rides that had not had FP in the past or were in the short-wait / walk-on category.
--Similar to Hydroguy, we used MDE without any freezing or crashing, we were on an iPhone 6 and an iPhone 5C using park WiFi. We did notice that it was sometimes slow to pull up our itinerary depending on what location we were in, but not tragically so -- and I don't know whether or not it was that we closed MDE when we weren't actively looking, but we didn't have battery issues on our phones.
--We had mixed success rescheduling during the day, some were easy, there were a couple of times we wanted to move things around and couldn't. We did coin a new term, the "Fast Passident", which is what happens when your teenager using MDE on the phone for the first time accidentally converts your 7DMT FP to Ariel's Grotto. DH was under the weather and not with us that day, so we decided it was a sign that we shouldn't ride it the first time without him.
--We definitely, definitely did not miss splitting up so that someone could go to get FP and then reconvene somewhere else. I know not everyone did this, but by all reports we were not the only ones who did.
Some less tangible -- and maybe even more useful -- observations ...
I felt like it did take some our family members longer to "break in" to FP+; it seemed to me that there were some psychological "flip of perspective" aspects to it similar to price tags that say $4.99 instead of $5. In the end I would class almost of all those as being some form of valuing FP+ more highly than we valued FP-. More specifically:
--DH on the third day said that he really liked it, but he thought it made the day feel scripted. After some discussion, he realized this was because he was regarding the beginning of the FP window as a fixed point that we had to make, rather than remembering that we had an entire hour to be there. We never did that with FP-, we always knew we had the whole hour and worked our plans around that. Once he realized he was doing this, we were able to go back to making plans that considered FP+ times the same as we would have weighted an old FP- time, and he said that he felt immediately less scripted and actually increasingly more comfortable with it on subsequent days.
A note here on the subject of spontaneity: one thing we realized this trip is that now that we have a severely opinionated 14 yo and an 11 yo, even the level of spontaneity that we had in the past doesn't always work for us. Not having a general plan turned out to be a recipe for standing around for 30 minutes arguing about what we should do while everyone got hot and cranky. So I do feel that this trip was less spontaneous for us, but I don't feel that FP+ was the biggest contributor to that loss. The days when we had the most disagreement about what to do, we didn't have problems changing our times when we finally came up with a plan that made everyone happy -- although again, low crowd time.
In some ways FP+ really helped us to have a plan that wasn't a plan; on the MK day described above, having the fixed points of FP limited our choices somewhat for the unplanned things that we did (Tikis, BTMRR, FOF parade) and made it easier for us to come to those spontaneous decisions. Our worst day was when we had all our FP first and then weren't ready to leave the park but had a blank canvas in front of us. Our second worst was when our middle FP ride was down, and were left with a big stretch and no constraints.
--Another mindset adjustment: one day we were planning the next little bit and someone said something like "and then we have to hang out until 3:25 to use our FP". I was like "What do you mean we have to hang out, this is one of our favorite parks where we never feel like we finish everything and there's tons of stuff to do in the meantime?" It turned out that we were parked out for the day, and with paper FP we would have just handed them to someone on our way out, but because of the "higher weighting" effect, people who didn't really want to stay in the park were suggesting that we stay in the park just to wait for the FP, not even because it was that important to them to ride that specific ride. Once we realized this we changed them to something low-demand so that someone else could pick up our desirable slots, and left.
Overall, I would say our experience was very positive, although it there was definitely a mindset adjustment and there were times when it didn't work out for us. Compared to FP-, I feel there were more times when FP+ worked in our favor where FP- wouldn't have helped us than there were the other way around. For us, I feel like the most concrete benefit of FP+ going forward is a result of the general wisdom that it is a very effective use of FP+ to schedule them for mid or late morning on. One of our big sticking points in the past was those mornings that we just couldn't get going. While we still intend to use RD as we have in the past, having mid/late-morning FP will allow us to wake up on some mornings, decide that we're too tired and sleep in an extra hour without having to sacrifice riding two or three hot ticket rides on FP. We'll still get less stuff done than if we arrived at RD, but the loss will be more in keeping with a price we're willing to pay for the extra relaxation of a slow start.
)
